Former Facebook and Apple engineer Scott Goodson is joining Pinterest to run the company’s mobile platform and web teams, focusing on improving the app’s performance across various devices.
Hires like this, of course, bring fresh blood and ideas to a growing startup like Pinterest that is rapidly becoming a powerful home for commerce and search. But most applications like Pinterest will also find that the responsiveness of the experience is deeply tied to the app’s engagement levels. Ensuring that there’s a high level of engagement is important for a company like Pinterest, because it can lead to searches, pins, re-pins and potentially conversions into sales.
Pinterest has also been very busy in that perspective. Earlier this month it launched Buyable Pins, which allows retailers to sell items directly on Pinterest. It also launched its Marketing Developer Program, which gives companies a set of tools to help them create pins that users are more likely to engage with. All these tools essentially give advertisers access to the whole spectrum of potential customers, from those randomly searching for new ideas to those searching for products and are ready to buy those products.
And to that effect, ensuring high levels of engagement helps Pinterest make sure people are returning to Pinterest over and over again, giving advertisers more of an opportunity to get in front of those users and drive Pinterest’s business. Pinterest can then reinvest that into its core products and, of course, hire people like Goodson to improve those products.
Like most roles at Pinterest, Goodson — who will be in a more engineering-centric role — will be working with designers and product leads to work on the end-user experience across devices. He’ll be leading a team that’s responsible for developing user-interface elements and the end-user experience of Pinterest.
Goodson at Facebook managed the Paper and Instagram iPhone and iPad engineering teams, and also led the rewrite of the core Facebook app. He also was one of the first engineers to work on the first iPhone operating system. He’ll report to Michael Lopp, Pinterest’s head of engineering.
